About Me

Blog Archive

Search This Blog

Friday, September 04, 2015

`Important People Think It Funny'

“It
is in these poems that we become acquainted, not with a mere literary performer—though
Du Bellay was a skilful one—but with the mind of a man who survives the
differences of centuries and speaks to us directly. This is the real test of
literature, and the reason why the fashions and reputations of particular ages,
including our own, do not count for much.”

In
anything I have read by C.H. Sisson, even an introduction to a translation aimed
at a general, non-academic audience, I finally hear the distinctive Sisson note
– confident, learned and with adversaries lurking in the underbrush. The
passage above is from his 1984 translation of The Regrets (Carcanet) by Joachim Du Bellay (1522-1560). Sisson
might be describing Du Bellay’s younger contemporary, Montaigne (1533-1592). Both
were defined by headstrong waywardness, recognition of tradition coupled with
an inability to be other than themselves. Obviously, that also applies to
Sisson, who distinguishes Les Regrets
from Du Bellay’s other work by describing the sonnets as “more weighty, if
still casually voiced, reflections.” A retired civil servant by the time he was
translating Du Bellay, Sisson felt kinship with Du Bellay, who in 1553 went to Rome
to work as secretary to his cousin, a cardinal and diplomat (Sonnet 39: “I love
liberty, but I am a servant, / I don’t like servile manners, but must have
them.”). Like Montaigne, both were men
of affairs who knew the obligations of public service. None inhabited the
garret. Here is Sisson’s translation of the eleventh sonnet in the sequence:

“Although
people at large have nothing to do with poetry,

Although
it is not a way of getting rich,

Although
soldiers need not carry it with their kit

And
to the ambitious it is merely silly:

Although
important people think it funny

And
those who are clever keep away from it,

Although
Du Bellay is sufficient witness

To
prove it not a skill that is valued highly:

Though
writing for nothing seems idiotic to courtiers,

Though
workmen don’t expect payment from sonneteers,

And
although following the Muse is the way to be poor,

Yet
I don’t feel tempted to give up

Because
writing poems is my only comfort

And
the Muse has given me six years writing and more.”

In
1965, Sisson published an essay on the Dorset poet William Barnes (1801-1886),
who was energetically prolific and often wrote in the Dorset dialect. Sisson says Barnes was “not a local poet
except by accident,” one who “exploited the natural speech of his boyhood.” He
writes:

“His
use of dialect probably enabled him to maintain his liberty of feeling amidst
the uncomprehending pressures he must have faced from his social superiors.
Barnes is not there to encourage a factitious oddity, but on the contrary to
demonstrate that the poet has to develop in a straight line from his origins,
and that the avoidance of literature is indispensable for the man who wants to
tell the truth.”

When
Carcanet published his collected essays in 1978, including the piece on Barnes,
Sisson titled the volume The Avoidance of
Literature.